


Aka Malva Antonio

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: Arden (Podcast), The Amelia Project (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-typical references to death, Crossover, Multi, Possibly Unrequited Love, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28143957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: His newest client has both a professional and a personal interest in the art of disappearances.
Relationships: Alvina & The Interviewer (The Amelia Project), Ambiguous Relationships - Relationship, Implied Alvina/The Interviewer (The Amelia Project), Implied Brenda Bentley/Bea Casely
Comments: 3
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Aka Malva Antonio

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Blue_Link13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Link13/gifts).



> AN: This is intended to make sense with knowledge of just The Amelia Project, as a client interview, and hopefully conversely works with the knowledge of just Arden when slotted into Brenda's wanderings.
> 
>  _[The Amelia Project](https://ameliapodcast.com/) is a dark comedy podcast about a secret agency offering a very special service: Faking its clients' deaths and bringing them back with a new identity._ \- this story takes place during S2 before the finale, though may include some non-spoilery details from S3.
> 
>  _[Arden](https://www.ardenpodcast.com/) is a scripted audio drama that's both mystery and comedy. The first season followed Bea Casely, a journalist, and Brenda Bentley, a detective, as they worked together to solve the 10-year-old disappearance of a Hollywood starlet._ \- this story **spoils the resolution of S1** although not all of the reasoning or details. It takes place between the end of S1 and the end of S2e1 with no real plot spoilers for S2.

_Congratulations. You’ve reached The Amelia Project. This phone call isn’t happening. If you’re not serious about this, hang up. Now. Are you sure about this? If you hesitated, do not proceed. Still there? If you continue, there’s no way back. The choice is yours. Good choice. A new life awaits. You’ll hear back from us within the hour. If you don't hear back, please consider the whole thing a hoax. Leave your message after the beep._

“Hey. So I've been doing a little digging into the best disappearances, call it professional interest, and your name keeps coming up. Nothing too loud. Somebody heard something about something, you know? But all of it saying the same things about these guys who really know _how_ to make a disappearance take. The 'Amelia Project'… What does that even _mean_? Anyway. I might be working for a Bond villain, if that’s interesting enough for you. Calls himself an eccentric billionaire – that’s literally on his business cards. Bugs all our conversations, even ones where it should in no way have been possible to plant a recording device, no matter if it’s work-related or not. Also involved in some freaky genetic experiments, lots of disturbingly pointless technology, and the last I heard he was genuinely building an underwater base. So call me back I guess.”

*

Alvina tilts her head to the side when she hears the message. “I _swear_ I know that voice.”

“She’s very American,” he replies. “Perhaps she sounds like someone else. What was that movie we saw last month, with the detective with the improbable accent? Maybe it’s that.”

Alvina is listening to the message again. “I mean... she _is_ American, yes. Or at least that would be my guess from the voice. But I don’t just confuse all Americans for each other.”

“It's more than that,” he tries to explain. “She doesn't just sound American, she sounds as though- well I don't know. _Very_ American.”

There is a particular expression Alvina gets, and she doesn’t know that he recognises it. It comes about when she is especially keen for an explanation and knows that he can’t provide her with one. She looks at him for a long moment and then sighs. “All right. So we'll bring her in for an interview then, shall we?”

*

When she arrives, Ms Antonio barely breaks stride at the sight of Salvatore wrestling an angry gelato seller down the stairs into the street. She moves to one side and watches him depart. “Another casualty of the great strawberry or chocolate ice-cream wars?”

“I've always favoured strawberry,” he tells her. “Although Neapolitan is nice. Malva Antonio, I presume? May I call you Malva?” He gestures her into the office. “Please take a seat.”

“It's Brenda,” she says. She sits down and pulls something out of her pocket. “You mind if I record this?”

“Excuse me?”

“To which?”

“Let’s start with the recording,” he tells her. “We don’t usually allow clients to make records of Amelia staff. Although it also doesn’t usually come up.” He is racking his brain and cannot bring to mind an example. There have been plenty of instances where someone has expressed alarm about the possibility that Amelia will record them, but he can’t think of anyone who wanted to record the interview themselves.

She shrugs. “Where I’m from, usually you want a record. And I bet that you guys keep them yourselves, right? That’s what I’d do. An operation like this, you want the documentation.”

“I take notes,” he says, gesturing with the book and pen.

“Old school, I like it, I do.”

“Ms Antonio- I’m sorry, what was it you were going to say about that?”

“My name? It’s Brenda. I was trying something, on your machine. Didn't take.” She shrugs with one shoulder, unconcerned or acting as though that’s the case.

“Ah. Well, it’s hardly the first time a client felt compelled to disguise their identity on their way to a meeting with us.” He tries to get the interview back on track. “Now, I understand you’re having some trouble with your employer.”

“Nah, not so much.”

He resists the urge to rub his temples. Barely. “So your employer is not, in fact, engaged in recording you at all times, including in premises he neither owns nor received permission to enter. He does _not_ record you and your colleagues when he has in fact explicitly assured you that no such recording will take place? And he is not at present engaged in constructing some kind of underwater base for mysterious and perhaps nefarious purposes?”

“No, he’s doing all of that. Probably more.” Brenda nods quickly. “It’s been a while since I checked in. He could be halfway to constructing a laser to destroy the moon in revenge for it thwarting his latest motivational dartboards by this point. It’s just not why I’m here.”

“Then why are- my apologies. May I offer you some cocoa?”

She smiles then. “All right. Sounds good.”

“Salvatore!” he calls out. “Two cocoas please.”

There’s no immediate sound of Salvatore hurrying to produce magic from their continually declining stocks from Les Deux Magots. (Alvina has been muttering darkly about their expenses again.)

“Salvatore!” he shouts again.

Brenda looks at him. “He the bouncer?”

“He may look like a man of singular talents but Salvatore is in fact also capable of- oh. You mean that he might still be occupied persuading Mr Knight away from our premises.”

“If that’s the ice-cream guy, then yeah. Just a guess.”

“Alvina!” he calls instead, though he’s not expecting anything to happen. Alvina has been very clear about her lack of interest in both providing his interviews with refreshments and in answering 'bellows' of her name.

However on this occasion she does appear in the doorway of his office. “Cocoa?” she asks, too sweetly. She brings the cups over to the table, looking at Brenda with more consideration than is entirely necessary. He’s never been quite comfortable with Alvina’s interest in other people.

Brenda disregards Alvina’s gaze in favour of the cocoa, which she gulps with enthusiasm that appears to be sincere, though not completely an appropriate way to begin a cup of _this_ cocoa. The first mouthful, at least, should be savoured.

“How is it?” he asks her. It’s always a useful question.

Brenda wipes off the corner of her mouth. “Pretty good.”

“ _Pretty good_? This cocoa is richer than rubies and smoother than silk, drawing you in as surely as the burning question that can never be answered, yet soothing as the singular answer which could make sense of all of life’s obscurities. _Pretty_ good...”

She raises one eyebrow. “Sorry. I'm not the- Casely handles the five-dollar adjectives.”

Before he can inquire further, Alvina abruptly shouts, “I _knew_ it!”

He jumps. “Alvina!”

She ignores him, turning to point at Brenda. “Brenda _Bentley_. You’re the host of that true-crime podcast, the one that- you’re the one with the skunk ape.”

“ _What?_ ” he demands, but he is still receiving no response from either of them.

Brenda sighs. “This is why I’m here. Shit like that.”

“Being recognised?” he asks.

Finally she answers him directly. “Being recognised as the one who thought Julie Capsom might have been dragged off by a skunk ape.”

“Was she?”

“Was she what?”

“Dragged off by a skunk ape.”

“I- no. That was kind of the whole- And that was never even my preferred theory! Aliens were _way_ more likely to have been responsible, and I wasn’t even that far wrong with that, she _was_ swept up into the-” Brenda takes a breath. “Should I start from the beginning? I’m starting to get the impression you _don't_ listen to true-crime podcasts.”

“Not usually, no,” he concedes. “I tend to prefer my entertainment a tad more upbeat. There’s time enough for murder in my work.”

“That’s fair.” She watches him for a moment. “But just before we get into it. The whole skunk ape thing didn't bother you at all?”

“I’ve seen rather stranger things than that,” he assures her. Life is long and complicated and when you have experienced all that he has, there are few ideas you simply dismiss out of hand. 

“How’d you feel about aliens?” she asks. Then: “Shady conspiracies fuelled by powerful and well-financed forces?”

“How do _you_ feel about parallel universes?” he counters.

“Huh,” she says. “Conflicted, I guess. Hopeful? Unsettled. I wonder about the choices parallel-Brenda made. Maybe she didn’t mess up the murder investigation first time round. Or she didn’t agree to meet this kid journalist in a bar afterwards and somehow ten years later find herself co-hosting a podcast still investigating one fucked-up mystery. Maybe she didn’t solve the mystery and she can still think of herself as mostly a good person.”

“Interesting.”

In the meantime, Alvina has done the Googly search to show him. She plays a clip from an American talk-show where someone else - apparently another podcast host - winces when the screen shows a graphic of Brenda musing about the skunk ape. There are a few fuzzy photographs and then an obvious humorous photo-manipulation, trying to illustrate something that looks a little like Bigfoot with white stripes down its body. The woman on screen laughs, trying too hard at it to have truly found the mockery amusing. 

“The world is an interesting place,” he tells Brenda. “And people will insist on trying to make it dull. Now. Speaking of interesting. I believe you still owe me a story.”

“I can’t swear you’ll find it interesting.” Brenda takes another long drink of cocoa and looks at him over the rim of the cup, challenging.

“Try me,” he says. “What happened on your podcast? Why do you want to disappear?”

“The thing is,” Brenda explains, “you make people disappear. I find them.”

He stares at her for a minute. “I can’t reveal information about our previous clients but I can assure you-”

“Not yours,” she says. “Other people. I was a private eye. I was pretty good, sometimes. And then Andy Wheyface - the genial Bond villain - bought up my detective agency, and the radio station, and probably half the county, but instead of stripping it all for parts like every other billionaire industrialist... he decided he wanted to own a podcast.”

“And that’s where you came in.”

“Me and Casely, yeah. Bea. She would deal with the reportage and sociological context-”

“And the adjectives.”

“And the adjectives, yeah. And I would deal with the investigating and the contacts and occasionally getting my hands a little dirty. We got both our hands dirtier than we intended in the end, though not in the ways we thought when we started recording. And our first case, after all of that, was an old suspicious disappearance that neither of us had ever really got over-”

“Julie Capsom! I _do_ recognise that name.” He has been mulling it over, putting the context together, and can finally picture an engaging face, young and full of life. He remembers the ten-year-old disappearance vaguely, remembers Amelia wondering aloud if one of their competitors had carried it out, leaving loose ends and a bloody torso in the trunk of a car, more questions than answers. But mostly: “My niece loves those movies. She thinks Jane Austen Fight Club is a ‘retro classic’, if you can believe that.”

“Christ.”

Alvina says, speaking up for the first time since Brenda began the story, “But you found her in the end.”

“Yeah,” Brenda says. “We did. We found Julie and the little family she’d built for herself and we ruined her life by finding her. And I’m thinking... I don't know. She couldn't have run forever, someone always- But then there’s you.”

“I’m sorry?” he asks.

“People get found, most of the time, because they slip up somewhere. They never quite cut the ties. They don’t become someone else, there’s still something holding them tight to the life they had. But these kids – Julie and Ralph - they were _brutal_. They gave up everything, caused all kinds of hell for the people around them, sure, but they knew what they wanted.”

“And what about you?” he asks. “Do you know what you want? The message on the telephone is quite clear, you know. It asks if you are-”

“Serious about this,” Brenda answers. “I remember. I’m _serious_ about it, I just don’t know what it is that I’m serious about. Or what the answer is.”

“To what?”

“If it works.”

“Disappearing?” He laughs. “I can tell you that none of our clients ever reappear here to complain about it.”

“I guess that’s something,” Brenda says. “Assuming you’re not just flat-out murdering them instead and I’m going to say you’re not. Where would you get all the referrals from?”

Alvina coughs. “I should really go back to work. I’ll send Salvatore in with more cocoa when he gets back.”

Brenda watches her leave and then turns back to him. “She’s cute. You gonna do something about that?”

He sputters, thrown.

Brenda’s smile is a wry slash across her face. “Sorry. Projection’s a bitch, huh.”

He pulls himself back together. “Ms Bentley, if this disappearance is simply a matter of some relationship woes, then I’m afraid we won’t be able to help you. Amelia only deals in interesting stories and even the most sincere romance is terribly dull.”

“I want to say something cool and wistful like: ‘Only if you’re not doing it right’. But yeah, love stories are mostly boring. Even from the inside.”

He is obliged to ask. “But she’s not the reason for your disappearance. Ms Casely?”

“Bea. No, she’s not the reason. Except in the way that we’re a great team. Good enough to break a cold case that no one else got anywhere with in a decade, and got Julie dragged back to the states for a trial. And that kid had a good reason to run, you know. A good reason, a good plan, and we still found her eventually. Casely would find me eventually, and if she didn’t then my assistant- my friend, Rosalind, she would. If I’m going to do this, I think I might need some help.”

“Very well. How would you like to disappear?” He starts to laugh, thinking about options. “Kozlowski would _love_ to fake a skunk ape. Or Luke is bound to have some interesting new effects we could try out. We’ve done aliens before of course but I think we could manage to innovate something in that area. Did you ever establish the characteristics of the aliens in your case?”

“We can’t do that,” she tells him. “It can’t be like- the _death_ can’t be interesting.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s going to be a challenge, sure, but it can’t be like- I can’t be dragged away by a pack of raging skunk apes and then the whole group of us get beamed into a beautiful silver spaceship in a flash of light. Which is sad for me, honestly, because that would be the coolest way to go.”

“So why shouldn’t we-?”

“Because Bea knows I think that! Casely’s a great journalist and she knows me and she’s stubborn to the point of fucking absurdity. If I got that disappearance, the kind that’s _perfect_ , just exactly satisfying for the kind of person she knows I am… she would know and she would never stop trying to figure it out.”

He feels compelled to note, “We are very good at what we do. The best in the business, in fact.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“To ask for a death so boring that your partner will not feel obliged to investigate it further.”

“Can you do it?”

He sniffs. “It’s not a matter of whether we can _do it_ , only whether the case is Amelia material. You must admit, faking a death to be as uninteresting as possible isn’t exactly the kind of work which fires the blood. In my experience, fooling the mass of humanity is not an especially difficult task.”

“You’ve never met Bea Casely.”

“No.” He looks at her. “What kind of death _would_ she believe?”

“I don’t know, something thoughtless and irresponsible. She’d buy that. Drove my car into the forest when I was investigating in the great outdoors, hit a tree and it fell on me or whatever. No aliens or cryptids or any of that shit. Something she can explain, something where she gets closure and doesn’t have to turn my death into a metaphor for America’s failures, all ready to be dissected over twelve episodes.”

He has to pause to consider Brenda. “Are you certain you _want_ to disappear?”

She shrugs. “Honestly?”

“But you’re here.”

“She wants to do another season. With me, even. She wasn’t pleased when we had to work together at the start, she wants to be so professional, to do things _right_ , and sometimes she looks at me like- you ever have someone you like turn and look at you like she’s not even _surprised_ that you disappointed her?”

He tries not to look at the closed door out of his office into the hallway. “That’s not really a reason to disappear.”

“Seems a pretty good one to me.” Brenda raises an eyebrow. “But no, it’s not that, not really. I don’t _want_ to disappoint her. But I don’t know if we did the right thing, finding Julie, and I don’t know if I can do it again. I don’t know if it’s something that anyone should be doing. That’s what I came to you for.”

“Amelia doesn’t really make moral judgements.” The only thing that might pass for morality in their case decisions is a refusal to non-consensually disappear someone else. What people decide to do for themselves - if they can pay and if the case is interesting enough – is up to them. Amelia simply facilitates. 

Brenda says, “No. But you know why people disappear, who gets hurt doing it, what happens next. You have to, right?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“Are you certain she would keep looking? Ms Casely that is. You’re certain she would pursue the case if she believed you to be out there somewhere, even if she thought you had arranged the matter yourself?”

Brenda goes still in her chair. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do if she didn’t.”

“Well then.”

There is a knock at the door before Alvina opens it and leans through. “Sorry, but I think you might want to listen to the new message on the answering machine.”

“Alvina,” he protests, “this isn’t exactly-”

“I know,” she says, “but I think you both should listen to this.”

Brenda looks between them and shrugs. “Sure, I’ve got nothing better going on.”

The three of them walk to the answering machine and stand over it. Alvina presses the button and the message begins to play.

A cheerful voice speaks, with the rhythmical cadence of someone reading from a script or an autocue. “ _Hello. This is a message from Andy Wheyface. Wheyface Industries would like to inform you of an imminent-_ ”

A new voice takes over the message, this one lighter but conveying disbelieving impatience, “corporate takeover. Andy, is this really-”

“ _Wheyface Industries cares deeply about your business, town, country or off-world self-sustaining colony, and its industry, mission or resources in-_ ”

“Illegal disappearances, apparently.”

Her voiceover doesn’t quite match with the gap left in the original recording, overlapping with the man reading: “ _and we are pleased that your strengths will become Wheyface’s strengths as we invest further in our own plans to-_ ”

“Steal back our damn co-host.”

“ _You will have five days to prepare, align, or comply as the situation requires. We look forward to-_ ”

“Brenda answering her fucking phone.”

“ _Please do not be alarmed. Wheyface Industries will do all that we can to make this process as simple as possible. Wheyface Industries: The Good People._ ”

“Andy, why did you record these things to end with the corporate slogan and not, I don’t know, a contact number? We need-”

The message cuts off but all three of them continue to look at the machine.

He says, “Well garnish me with olives and call me a dirty martini. Your employer, I presume.”

Brenda releases a bark of laughter. “Former, supposedly.”

“And this _isn’t_ what you’re trying to escape from,” he checks.

“Nope.”

Alvina’s fingers tap staccato on the table. “Should we be concerned about this? We’ve had…issues with surveillance attempts in the past. How did they get our number in the first place? Is it possible they’re tracking your phone?”

Brenda says, “Judging from that, if they knew where we are there’d be a private plane on the roof already.”

“A private plane-”

“Andy isn’t really one for going in small.”

“I can tell,” Alvina answers. “Ms Bentley, we take our confidentiality very seriously here and this isn’t exactly-”

“It’s fine,” Brenda says. “I was leaving anyway.” She looks back at him and smirks. “We couldn’t reach any conclusions on whether I was Amelia material.”

Brenda immediately turns and heads for the staircase, ignoring Alvina’s attempts to hold her back to finish off the necessary paperwork. There is always paperwork, it seems. Even for those clients who don’t make it further than the interview.

Alvina gives up. “We’ll send something on to her,” she concludes. “Not like we don’t know where she’ll be, I’ll just find the address for their studio and send it to Arden podcast.”

“I suppose so.”

“That was an odd one.”

“Yes. Alvina?”

“Yes?”

“…never mind. Would you care to have a glass of Veuve Clicquot with me? Ms Bentley left before we had reached that portion of the interview.”

Alvina looks at the wall-clock. “Oh, all right then. You can fill me in on the details. Did you decide that you didn’t want to repeat the alien stunt? It _did_ nearly kill Joey last time though I don’t suppose the near-fatal properties of green metallic paint is something you suddenly chose to concern yourself with.”

“You know I don’t like to repeat myself, Alvina,” he tells her. “Although I would have found something new in it, if I needed to.”

“I know,” she says, and collects two glasses.

They don’t pick up the last message until later that evening.

He recognises the voice from the video earlier. There is laughing again, but a different kind of laughter than before. This one is trying to appear casual and not succeeding. Even he can tell that.

“This is Bea Casely, and I’m- a reporter, or a podcaster - both, I won a Poddy, actually- not the point. Brenda, I don’t know what you’re doing, I don’t know what all of this is- what does ‘Amelia Project’ even _mean_? Listen, I know you have concerns about what happened last season. _I_ have concerns about it, come on, it’s not like I wanted Julie in jail, I just- I wanted to know the truth. And I get that there’s some dubious morality in saying that and also profiting from finally having enough listeners that it actually mattered when we- I can’t record the intro for season two. I keep trying and I just can’t- I can’t get the words. I keep waiting for you to interrupt me or laugh or rewrite it on the fly and I just- I wanted to give you time, Brenda. But I won’t-”

He looks at Alvina, who is busily archiving the recording and wiping the machine again. He says, “Alvina?”

“Yes?”

“What would you do if I disappeared?”

“I’m sorry?”

“If I disappeared, like one of our clients. Beamed up by aliens or cannon-balled to Antithon, or cut into pieces by cannibals?”

“When was- never mind. What are you asking?”

“Exactly what I said. What would you do?”

Alvina frowns at him. “I’d go and ask Amelia if she knew anything about it, and then I would go and find you. Start with triangulating global shifts in Malteser sales, probably.”

“All right.”

“But you’d never do that anyway.” She grins at him. “You wouldn’t last ten minutes out there without me. Who would write the casefiles you never read? Or stop you spending twice as much as we earn on confectionary and post-it notes?”

“They help me organise my thoughts.”

“I know.”

“Thank you, Alvina.”

Alvina smiles. “Plus I would miss Scrabble nights. So try _not_ to disappear, would you?”

“You too,” he answers.

She bumps his arm with hers. “Deal. Now, I need to go and check in with Amelia and make sure we haven’t actually been purchased by a shadowy billionaire with mysterious interests. The paperwork alone would be a nightmare and I’m already behind on the archiving. Are you going home or… see you later?”

“Of course.” 

She heads upstairs to Amelia’s office and he walks back into his own and closes the door. He sits in front of his computer and hesitantly types. A few minutes later Bea Casely’s voice is spilling from his speakers: _Join us, won’t you, as we unravel the mystery…on Arden_. Immediately Brenda’s voice interrupts and the two of them take off together. He smiles, and sits back with a box of Maltesers to wait for Alvina.


End file.
